0

Real Estate Investing For Good With Dr. Nancy Huynh – Real Estate Women

 

Many investors are in real estate as a side hustle and to create passive income. But how do you know when it is time to finally start settling in the industry for good, taking a more active role in achieving financial freedom? Eye surgeon and impact real estate investor Nancy Huynh, MD, helps us answer this question as she joins Moneeka Sawyer in this episode. Nancy founded Clear Vision Investing to help others, especially physicians, realize the power of real estate and achieve financial security. She tells us how she does that while sharing her own journey to investing and getting in syndications. Extending her success to others, Nancy then discusses investing for impact. She talks about her mission with real estate to help cure preventable blindness globally. Follow along with this impactful conversation to learn how you can achieve financial freedom and help others at the same time.

—

Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

Real Estate Investing For Good With Dr. Nancy Huynh – Real Estate Women

Real Estate Investing For Women

I am so excited to welcome to the show, Nancy Huynh. Nancy is a Physician, an Eye Surgeon and Impact Real Estate Investor. She started investing in real estate to create passive income, hoping to regain control of her time and stop trading time for money. She founded Clear Vision Investing not only to grow her own portfolio but also to help others realize the power of real estate. She’s passionate about helping others, especially physicians, gain financial literacy and achieve financial security through real estate investing.

She believes that financially intelligent physicians can change medicine and the world for the better. As an impact investor, Nancy believes that real estate investing can deliver attractive financial returns while also making a positive social impact. I believe that too. Part of the profits from her company is donated to giving the gift of sight to someone in need and to cure preventable blindness globally. Nancy, that sent shivers down my spine and all over. What a beautiful bio and a beautiful mission. Welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited to be here with you.

It’s so funny, Nancy. We think of doctors as rich and smart. Many people think of them as pompous. They think they know everything. My mom’s a physician, so you know, I know the way the world perceives. We need our doctors and there are all these opinions. What’s so interesting is we never think of a physician as needing financial literacy. I know from personal experience because my mom is a physician, so we hung out with a lot of them. They make a lot of money. They also have this huge social expectation to live up to. They spend so much of that time, first of all, serving their patients but then also feel it because they’re of service. They come to the world of service.

That’s what physicians do. They also feel that they have to live up to the expectations of how people see them. They put so much more importance outwardly. They don’t have the financial of literacy to create a life that then can be bigger than themselves. It’s so awesome. We’ve had one other doctor that’s doing a very similar thing on the show. I love what you’re doing for these people that serve us, serve their communities. They go through this huge education. They go through their residencies.

They sacrifice so much to be able to be of service then their lives get so tied up that they never get to retire or never get to get the freedom of time with their children and their families and the things that are important to them. Good job. To expand it to something even bigger than that, to be even bigger service to the community in different ways. Thank you for that.

Thank you for that perspective. You hit it right on point. Physicians were so used to sacrifice. Sacrificing our twenties and often our early thirties or even later, sometimes many years to get into this profession and become that attending physician. Through that process, we also financially accumulate a lot of debt. A lot of us graduate with over six figures of student loans from college and med school. When you’re in residency, you’re earning less than minimum wage for the amount of hours that you work. You start off with this negative net worth and all of a sudden, as you said, society expects you to live up to this expectation of this doctor image, the big house, the cars, the private schools.

People often get caught in the cycle of where they’re working and they’re making good money, but they’re chasing a hamster wheel. They never, as you said, experience that financial freedom but also that time freedom and, eventually, that geographic freedom, freedom of relationships and freedom of purpose to do what you want to do.

It’s so sad. This is true in many professions. Not just with physicians. I’ve seen it with vets, with dentists, in all different professions, whether it’s healthcare or not, where people sacrifice so much and end up in a place where they don’t get the freedoms that will make their life blissful. It’s amazing. Tell us a little bit about your journey, like how did you get from being physician to real estate investor? The two-minute high level, how did you get here?

Briefly, I’m a child of refugees. My parents came here after the Vietnam War in 1980. I was the first in my family to be born in the US. Unlike many children from immigrant families, were taught, “Study hard. Go to school and get good grades. Go to a good college and get that good job.” I followed this very prescribed path and along the way, I fell in love with medicine. That’s what I did. I went through medical school and fell in love with eye and ophthalmology and eye surgeries and giving the gift of sight. After I got off that training, I started working.

This is what got me. I realized, “I’m making pretty good money,” but the one thing I could never make back was my time, the one non-renewable resource. I could never get back and this especially hit home. I already had this feeling, but this especially hit home when my daughter was born. I remember she had a 103-degree fever and I had gone back to work after maternity leave. She was probably three or four months old.

The nanny called me and was like, “Can you come home? I’m not sure what to do.” I remember looking at my clinic schedule and I was like, “I cannot because I can’t cancel on these patients. I’ll be home as soon as possible.” I remember that feeling I was serving everyone but the one thing that I want to do now, which was to be with my daughter to figure out what was going on. I couldn’t do it because I didn’t have that time freedom. That time, I realized, was more valuable than anything. That’s when I thought to see what I could do. I discovered this thing called passive income and through that, I discovered real estate. That’s when I was off to the races with real estate.

What you talk about is that passive income creates optionality and choices. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen my TEDx Talk, but it’s all about choice creates happiness. Choice gives you time freedom. Choice gives you the relationships that you want. I love your perspective on that. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Money can’t buy happiness in and of itself but advise you that optionality, as we’re talking about. Once you take that financial burden off of you, you’re a little freer to say, “Now I don’t need to trade my time to earn this paycheck, to pay the bills, to pay the mortgage. What do I do with that time?” Sometimes it means I want to work more. I want to be more patient. I want to do more surgeries, but the freedom of saying it’s my choice to do that is different than saying, “I have to do it.”

 

I think that’s the key distinction that I want your readers to know. It’s different when you’re doing something, but you feel like you have to do it versus, I’m choosing to do it. It might be the same thing, for instance. I could do twenty cataract cases, but it’s one thing to say, “I have to do it because I have to earn this amount of money to cover these expenses.” Versus, “I choose to do it because I love it. I want to help these patients.” It brings a completely different viewpoint and it’s so freeing.

It also helps to shift your identity. I’ve got a similar story. My husband and I were trying to get pregnant. We were going through the fertility thing and I had had eleven miscarriages and we were on our 12th pregnancy. I remember one morning. I went to my doctor to do my ultrasound and we lost the heartbeat that morning. I remember bawling in the little white room that I was sitting there. The doctor left to give me a moment. I cried and cried. I called my husband and I said, “We lost the heartbeat. I need you.” It was about 11:00 and he said, “Sweetheart, I’ve got meetings all day. I’ll be home at 4:00.”

He wanted to be there with me and I knew that. It wasn’t his fault, but I think for him, he also realized, “I want to be able to be a yes. My identity as a software programmer is not as important as my identity as husband to Moneeka.” It was an interesting shift from being professional, this is how I identify myself and this is my value to, I want to be a choice for this. I want to be a programmer because it’s fun. That’s when he got involved. He’s still not hugely involved in my business but got his buy-in.

We need to create enough passive income so that if you decide that you don’t want to be a programmer anymore, you don’t want to be tied up to a job, now you can do that. When you’re doing it, it’s because you love it, you’re passionate about it, not because you have to. It’s this idea of creating the passive income to become job optional. Not necessarily retire. I say retire and all my stuff because it’s an easier way to say. It sounds better than job optional, but what we’re going for is being able to create the bliss in your life that you’re searching for. That may be continuing to work.

I think for a lot of us, it’s going to involve some work. Whether it be, “I want to stay home more with my kids.” Being a mom is a lot of work. I have two young children so that in itself is work. You get to choose, as you said, what your identity, what title you want to choose and it could be fluid, but then it becomes your choice. Instead of saying, “I have to be changed to this 9:00 to 5:00 at this desk because my employer told me I have to. I have to get that every two-week paycheck. I have to be this identity from Monday to Friday from 9:00 to 5:00.”

What if you have those options with passive income to say, “Monday and Tuesday, I want to be a doctor. I want to be a surgeon. Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, I want to be a mom or I want to be a real estate investor or whatever you want to do.” It gives you a lot more choices. The flexibility of having options is what frees the mind. I think when people get stuck and feeling like they’re “trap” is when they don’t have options. If you have ten options, even whatever problem you’re solving, it doesn’t seem like a problem anymore, then it’s very freeing.

The flexibility of having options is what frees the mind. Share on X

It may feel like a challenge, but you have more confidence. You have more emotional and mental and creative confidence that you can get through it, get to the other side of it. Do you think anybody can invest in real estate?

I do.

Tell me about that.

I knew nothing about real estate other than buying a primary home. There’s so much out there now, so much education. Maybe it was different years ago. I don’t know. I didn’t look way back, but I’m sure if there’s a will, there’s a way. Especially in this day and age, there are podcasts. There are free webinars, a bunch of events that you could go to. It’s a matter of getting educated but also getting your mindset right.

A lot of the roadblock to people starting in real estate is in their minds and the mind games that they play themselves with. As Tony Robbins likes to say, “80% of success is psychology or mindsets and only 20% of strategy.” If it were all strategy, then all of us would have six packs. All the librarians would be billionaires with all the books that they consume. It’s not just the knowledge. It’s also knowledge of your mindset and with action that you could make it happen.

I’ve been calling mindset the ultimate strategy. It is a strategy in and of itself to get that under control.

A lot of the mindset, as we were talking about before, it is the identity you choose for yourself and the stories that we choose ourself. As women, how many stories do we tell ourselves that are not necessarily true or that we think it’s true, then we found so much evidence to reinforce it, to say it’s true when it’s not?

I always tell people everything that’s going on in our lives, we’ve made up anyways. We make up the story. The circumstance happens and three different people will see it in three different ways. You’ve made up your story about that circumstance. Why not make up stories that support you and make you and uplift you and give you those rose-colored glasses that will make life easier and more blissful. Rather than making up the stories about strife and difficulty and challenges and exhaustion and all of those things?

The fact of the circumstance, it’s how we view, as you said, through our colored lens or no colored lens. That’s how it shapes our perception and our thoughts of it. Our thoughts ultimately shape our actions, which lead to our results. That’s why it all starts with mindset. It’s circumstance but then the thoughts we put on it, which ultimately drive our actions then our results. It’s all in what story you want to tell ourselves, like when we’re little girls. Some of us tell ourselves these fairy tales. Why can’t we dream like that anymore? We can.

Our thoughts ultimately shape our actions, which lead to our results. Share on X

Talk to me a little bit about the difference between active real estate investing as opposed to passive real estate investing because you’ve chosen passive. Talk to me a little bit about how you see those differences.

I think it’s a spectrum of active versus passive. Oftentimes, we make this clear divide, but it’s not necessarily soul. It depends on your circumstance, what you want, and what your goal of investing is. I’ve done both. I started off active like many people do that we think of real estate investing, which is to buy a single-family or a duplex and rent it out, which is what I did because it’s what I knew and what I was comfortable with. With comfort gives certainty and it makes you take action. I’m so glad I did that.

As I started building up my portfolio, I first self-managed my first one and quickly realized it was not worth my time. My time was better spent with my children, taking care of my patients, so I quickly handed off to a property manager. Even with a property manager, the decisions always float up to the top. I get calls about it. The other thing about active is you are the one who has to go source the property. Go find it, put in the offer and you might not win it. It does take time to find the property and get it under contract and all that.

Even for a property manager, it still requires some of your time management. I’ll give you an example. I was at the park with my daughter and I get this call from the property manager. They’re like, “All the water has backed up into both bathrooms into this property.” I was like, “Okay.” He’s like, “Don’t worry, I’ll get it all taken care of,” but you worry. You can’t not worry. The sewer had backed up. Instead of spending that afternoon with my daughter, I was like spent on the phone texting and calling.

That’s an example of what I found wasn’t quite fitting the lifestyle that I wanted at this time. That’s when I discovered passive investing. Passive investing with syndications, for those of us who don’t know what syn occasions are, it’s basically a group investment, instead of you taking your $100,000 and buying a single-family home, for instance. You could take that $100,000 and pull it with a group of people to buy a $10 million apartment building. No one person can probably have that huge down payment or that money to buy that apartment but as a group, you can do that.

I’ve shifted to the strategy for several reasons. One is my time, as I said. Even if I had the time, I didn’t necessarily want to spend it working in a real estate business, doing all the properties I wanted to spend time with my daughter, being the best surgeon I can, and honing that craft. The second was I could leverage a professional team who do this full time and leverage their network, their time, their expertise.

The third thing that I saw was I’m able to diversify because when I was buying my own active properties. I like to see and feel and touch it. I invested in my backyard here in Atlanta. I was pretty confined in terms of market, but now, I get an investment in the South, the Southeast and the Midwest. I could also diversify. I do mostly multifamily, but I invested in hotels and other commercial properties. You get to spread your money across different sponsors as well because you could put $50,000 here, $100,000 here and spread it across.

You’re mitigating your risk across markets and also across sponsors. One more thing that I like is that you have limited liability. When you own your own properties, even if you put in an LLC, you’re personally liable. Eventually, the buck stops with you. With being a limited partner and syndications, you’re basically limited to the amount that you invest in, no matter what happens for the most part. If someone falls on the sidewalk and sues, the most they could ever get is the amount that you invested. I like those aspects. Now because I have young children and I’m busy with my career, I found that passive investing has been a great vehicle for me.

 

How did you get into investing in syndications? Let me give you some perspective, Nancy, on why I’m asking that question. I’m in a lot of syndications for the same reasons, different markets and different class types. I’ve invested in storage, mobile home parks, multi-unit, even some big luxury single families.

I’m in some cool projects and I have my own projects also. I get so many of these that come across my desk now as a show host. People know me now because I’m public about that I’m interested in this. I get so many of these that come across my desk. For me, I know how I got started. I started having guests like you on my show but how did you get started? What turned you onto that?

How I heard this term syndication, I had never heard of it, even though I had been buying single-family and duplexes. My husband’s also a physician. One of his colleagues had owned quite a bit of a portfolio here. All of a sudden, when we got with him one day to catch up, he’s like, “I sold off my whole portfolio. I’m investing in these syndications.” I’m like, “What? What is this?” We started digging and I started digging and found out what it was.

At first, I thought, “This is like a scam. It sounds like a Ponzi scheme.” As I got further into it and got educated, I think that’s the key. The more education you get, the more confidence you feel. I’m like, “I think this is legitimate. I hear people doing it. I’ve seen it work for other people. They have these structures in place.” The key thing is to vet the sponsor and vet the deal. Number one is sponsor. Number two, I would say, is market then number three is the actual deal. That’s what we did. I started interviewing different sponsors. We’re doing it and getting comfortable and watching on the sidelines before I jumped in to make sure that we were the right fit that they were conducting themself, character-wise, in a way that someone I want to partner with.

It is scary because you’re handing over control to someone else versus if you bought your own property. You got to choose when you refinance, what colors you paint the walls, etc. This is like handing over $50,000, $100,00 to someone and saying, “I trust you to be a good steward of this money. That you’re going to protect it and grow it.” It is scary when you first wire that money to someone you might have met o online. I think the first key is to get educated.

As you were saying that, something came to me. It’s a little bit, not quite, but it’s a little bit like investing in stock. When you invest in the stock market into a company, you’re basically turning over this money to a company where they make all of the decisions. You have very little stay unless you’re a major stockholder. They’re managing the whole thing. I feel like in syndications, we have a lot more control over who we invest with. We have a lot more information about who’s running the project and that thing. It is a little bit of that same feeling of someone else has control over this project that I’m now investing in. Would you say that that’s true?

I would agree and disagree with that. I would agree in the sense that you are handing over your money to someone so it feels like you don’t have control anymore. Something I like about syndication that’s different from stock market is that you know who controls it. In the stock market, you’re like, “Let me click this button,” and some big corporation is doing it, which brings me to the point of the difference between syndications and REITs. Sometimes when I talk to other women, physicians, or investors, like, “I don’t need to diversify in real estate. I own some REITs or some stocks in real estate.”

Those are two different things because owning a REIT is like buying stock or a share in a company that invests in real estate, but you don’t own the real estate like you do when you invest in a syndication, which is like you own a fraction of a piece of real estate. You still get all the depreciation, the tax benefits, the cashflow versus when you invest in a REIT. It’s like investing, say, an Apple or Facebook. You get a share in that stock.

Thank you. These are great investments. REITs are great investments if you want to be completely hands-off. They have different kinds of REITs. You can go into doing malls. You could do all of it. You could do the mobile homes. They’ve got all these different REITs or whatever or full spectrum. To me, that’s a little bit more like a mutual fund with a manager. It’s not as much as direct real estate investment. Good distinction. Thank you for that. Talk to me a little bit about investing for impact. I know this is a big piece of who you are in the world. I’d love to hear how you do this and why this is so important to you.

I think at the core of it, especially for us women, when we invest. It is great to get the returns, but especially for women, we’re so purpose driven. We’re so community driven that a lot of the women investors I talk to resonate with the fact that they want to do something bigger for the world, for their community, for their families. If you think about it, that’s what money’s for it. It’s not to collect this power of cash. It’s what you can do with it. If you can make a positive impact for yourself, for your family, for your community, for the world, it’s so much better.

For me, one of my passion projects that are preventable blindness. I was turned on to ophthalmology, the field of eyes. When I was a medical student and I witnessed the miracle of cataract surgery for the first time. When this completely blind patient was hunched over, walked in with someone assisting him and with a ten-minute surgery, walked out jumping for joy and able to independently stand up and walk away, it changed his life.

What your readers may not know is that 80% of the world’s blindness is preventable. It was something as simple as pure glasses or a 5 or 10-minute $25 cataract surgery. That’s unacceptable. Part of my mission with real estate investing and the profits I earn is going towards this cause because I think it’s a tragedy and an injustice for people to live like this who are blind and don’t necessarily have to be. I would challenge your readers. There’s something that you want to make an impact off because we’re all purpose-driven.

We all want to grow and contribute in some way. Find what you’re passionate about, then see how your returns and your investments from real estate or whatever you’re investing in can help feel that mission of yours. That’s why I’m so passionate about it because impact investing, you can invest not just for great returns but also make a positive social impact on whatever you decide to make an impact on.

How does that translate for you? Does that mean that you have extra time to do the surgeries? Do you contribute to other organizations that do the surgeries? How do you utilize the money that you make from real estate to make that possible for yourself?

I would love to travel more to be able to lend my skills to this. I’ve done so in the past. With COVID, it’s less easy and with two young kids, it’s harder to travel. As I get older, it’s a priority of mine to physically go and perform these cataract surgeries. I partner with different organizations before, but the one that I’ve partnered with my real estate company, Clear Vision Investing with a nonprofit called Gifts like Global. Why? I love their mission.

They’re on this mission to cure preventable blindness, but they’re doing it very entrepreneurial. It’s the thought of, don’t give a man a fish but teaching them how to fish. Instead of saying, “We’re going to send a group of surgeons in there from the US, from Canada for two weeks and to do a bunch of cataract surgery,” which is the traditional model of “curing preventable blindness.” Instead, they’re funding these vision centers where the people in the village or the community are going out to screen their own people to see who needs surgery.

In turn, they’re building surgery centers within the hospital and bringing in surgeons from the US or Europe to teach people within that community, the doctors within that community, or they might have to travel further to learn to do these surgeries. It becomes a self-sustaining cycle where when you donate once, it hopefully continues to cycle where you don’t have to keep donating the money or bringing in surgeons every 2 weeks, every 2 months. It’s setting that foundation for them, letting them run it as a business.

The self-sustaining contribution. I’ve got a little story like that too. My ladies know that I have, since I was very young, a sixteen-year-old woman, been contributing to the education of women in India because of a traumatic experience that I had when I was living there. As I became a little bit older, the temple that I’ve affiliated with opened up a school in India to educate the community. Not just girls. The girls got an education but to educate the boys also that equality is a good thing. To elevate the entire community so that the women get educated and can have a better life. Everybody has a better life as each of us is uplifted. I became very involved with that school and have made multiple thousands of dollars of contribution to that school over the years.

My ladies have heard about this. What’s been very interesting lately is I had a conversation. I was having lunch with my swami. He was saying that the school is now completely self-sustaining. They built a water line that they then utilize and they also sell some water now. That water line also goes to their orchard of coconut trees. They then sell coconut milk, coconut water, coconuts, all this stuff because that’s a very big product in India to surrounding communities. They have some cows, so they have milk.

They’ve got all this stuff that they have their farm, so now the school is self-sustaining as far as its food and nutrition and all of that stuff. They also can sell some of this. Now they can continue to pay the teachers and stuff like that. I still donate because I want them to expand further, which is what their goal is. The students that are in the school now, all 1,000 of them, are guaranteed in education up through high school, basically. I think it’s from kindergarten through high school. It’s a full twelve grades.

Once they’re in, they’re guaranteed that education because they’re self-sustaining. I also appreciate it. It was part of the goal from years ago when we first started this. We have to build and we need to get donations and all of those things. Part of the plan is to make itself sustaining so that these children are guaranteed the education, the communities are guaranteed this uplifting presence, an opportunity in their communities and for it to be self-sustaining so that we’re not constantly trying to get more money and doing the fundraising thing. To me, that’s a new path of contribution. Would you agree with me on that?

I agree when it’s self-sustaining like that or requiring very minimal continuous donations. It not only helps the donors or nonprofits that keep having to chase donor money. It also helps the communities or countries you’re trying to help because, as you said, it uplifts them. When you give someone the power to change their situation, give them the power to earn some money and give them the power of entrepreneurship, their lives can change. They realize they have the power within to change their situation. That’s so powerful, not from a monetary contribution standpoint but also from the point of view of the people that were trying to help.

 

I had never thought of that, Nancy, that other piece of that this is even possible, the mindset shift that happens. That’s amazing. You changed my paradigm right there. Thank you for that.

You’re welcome. I’ll give you a classic example. There’s a gender gap with blindness, so 55% or a little over 55% of people who are blind around the world are female and girls. Now that we’ve given them this opportunity to go around screening people for vision, they have economic opportunities that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to have.

After they get their surgeries and their cure of their blindness and able to see, they’re able to contribute to the very organization and mission of what helped them with their vision. It’s like a self-sustaining cycle where the people that you help are now able to help others in their community. It would be wonderful if we could find some self-sustaining solution for all problems around the world.

I love that. I’ve never said this and I’m not sure how to articulate this. I don’t want it to come out wrong. Ladies, bear with me, but I’m very much into Abraham Hicks. Do you know anything about this?

I don’t know him.

Law of Attraction? She started this trend. Esther Hicks started this trend, Esther and Jerry. It’s a long story, but I’m very much into the law of attraction that what we put out there is what we get in return. When I talk about having a blissful life, part of that blissful life is that I know I’m an attractive magnet for bliss to come towards me because that’s the energy that I send out consistently. It’s my biggest mission in my own life.

That works financially and health-wise and all of those things, what you put out is attractive. We all know that, but there’s this what we call the Law of Attraction. Anyway, I’m into Esther Hicks and Abraham Hicks. I was on a cruise once with them. Someone came to the chair, the hot seat. You can tell I’m Indian. She said, “I wanted to make all of this money so that she can co she can contribute to causes.” What Esther immediately said and she supposedly channels. I believe that she does, but whatever for whatever.

She channels all of her answers. The answer that came back is that, “You can enable people’s inability to take care of themselves.” I was offended by that because I am so big into contribution. I feel like there are so many people that are so much less fortunate than me. I want to help. I’m so blessed with what I’m able to do. It’s a big piece of who I am and how I define myself. I was offended, but then we have this conversation about contribution can have a different face. It’s not necessarily giving to people and enabling them to continue to need. It can be enabling people to grow and be uplifted and to then turn around and contribute in the way that they were contributed to. That was such a beautiful paradigm shift for me. Thank you.

Thank you for sharing that. That’s beautiful. You put it perfectly.

Thank you. This has been such a lovely conversation. We’ve got more. Nancy wants to talk about harmony integration. As women, we play so many roles. With her, it’s physician, mother, wife, surgeon, investor, entrepreneur and philanthropist, there are so many roles that she plays. There are so many roles that each of us plays in our life, daughter, grandchild, sister. There are so many of these, friend. We’ve had other ladies come on the show and talk about that balance.

I think that each time we have a lady talk about that, we pick up new nuggets because each of us perceives our lives differently. We bring a different skill set into creating that harmony. I feel like we’re due for that conversation again. I asked Nancy if she’d be happy to share that with us in EXTRA and she said yes. I’m so excited. We’re going to be talking about that in EXTRA, so stay tuned ladies. Nancy, can you tell people, I know you’ve got a free gift for my ladies. Could you share about that?

I have a free due diligence checklist for ladies interested in real estate syndications. Some of you might be interested in buying your own rentals, but for those of you who are like, “I never want to be a landlord. I don’t want to fix toilets, deal with tenants.” A great way to passively invest, like we briefly touch upon in this episode, is through syndications. One of the things that stop a lot of people is that they don’t know where to start or what questions to ask or how they know that the sponsors, whoever they are handing the money to, is not going to take it and run it away and never to be seen again.

I put together this checklist because these questions have helped me analyze the deals I’ve been looking at since I first started. You can go to my website at ClearVisionInvesting.com. Under Learn, there’ll be a due diligence checklist and it’s free. Download it, see if you could get any value from it and I’ll love to hop on a call to chat if you want to and walk you through it.

That’s how they can reach you and all of that too?

Yes.

Perfect. Thank you for that. That was very generous.

Thank you.

Are you ready for our three rapid-fire questions?

I’m ready. Let’s go.

Nancy, tell us one super tip for getting started investing in real estate.

Education. The more you get educated, the more confident you’ll be and the more you’ll be ready to take action. That’s the question I get asked quite often by a lot of ladies, a lot of women physicians. How do I get started? I said, “Start with your education.” That’s the one thing that no one can take away from you. Once you’re armed with that power, you’re ready. Armed with education then getting your mindset right and taking action. You’ll get the results that you want. Start with your education.

The more you get educated, the more confident you'll be and the more you'll be ready to take action. Share on X

What’s one strategy on being successful as a real estate investor?

I think it’s learning to pivot. I take this from my medical and surgical career because there have been so many times I’ve had to pivot. Whether it be this medication’s not working at the pivot to another medication or I’m in the middle of eye surgery and something is wrong. I have to pivot to get through the surgery. I’ve taken those skills to apply to real estate because, as we know, as real estate investors, nothing is as planned.

No matter how much you underwrite it. No matter how much the performer looks great. Something is always bound to go wrong or not take the turn that you didn’t expect it to. Learning to recognize the situation as it is, as we talked about in this episode then what are the options? What do you do from here? Having that flexibility and knowing how to pivot will take you a long way.

That’s so good. It’s been so real over the last couple of years, with so much changing so fast.

If you think about from COVID to now, during COVID, it was like, all these prices were blowing up, but the interest rates were super low. Now, as interest rates are rising, people are shooting themselves in the foot to say, “I should have walked in at the low-interest rate because I still would’ve earned a better return than yes, the prices are stabilizing or falling.” Depending on the market you are. Now the interest rates are high and some properties don’t even cashflow anymore. It’s learning to pivot according to what the current conditions are.

Nancy, what would you say is one daily practice that you do that contributes to your personal success?

The one thing is that I have a very set morning routine. Part of that includes exercise. I exercise almost every day. It’s very rare that I miss it unless I’m traveling or something. I feel that if you get your body right in the right state, it puts your mind in the right state then you feel like you’re ready to take the world after that. I love to get my body running and moving first thing in the morning so that I feel like nothing can derail me.

Do that before you pick up your phone and answer emails. Set that time for yourself. It might not be an exercise for some people. It might be something else, but before you pick up that phone to check Instagram or Facebook, leave that alone and focus on you for the first 30 minutes or so of the morning, then you could react to everything else. We’re so used to reacting throughout the day that we’re not proactive about what our intentions are. How do I want to act? How do I want to react to various situations throughout the day?

I always say that my little smartphone is this little device of other people’s agendas. Even a game is another person’s agenda. They’ve got in-app purchases. This little device has everybody else’s intentions and everybody else’s agendas.

It’s hard. I have my phone right next to me as we’re speaking. It attaches to us, but I think saying, “I’m not going to touch it for this amount of time,” in the morning in particular, it sets your day so well because then you’re like, “This is my agenda for this time and for this day.”

It sets you straight on the right road moving forward. I love that. Thank you for that. This has been such a great show. Thank you for all that you’ve offered my ladies, Nancy.

Thank you for having me. I’m glad and hopefully, people took something away from it. I always learn from these conversations and from people I meet. We’re all better together. A rising tide lifts all boats. I believe in that saying and we lift each other up.

Thank you so much. Ladies, we’ve got more, so stay tuned. Nancy’s going to be sharing how to integrate and harmonize all of those roles that we play in our lives. It’s so important to our bliss. I’m excited that she’s going to be sharing her perspective on that in EXTRA. If you are subscribed to EXTRA, stay tuned. If you are not, you can get subscribed by going to RealEstateInvestingForWomenEXTRA.com.

For those of you that are leaving Nancy and I now, thank you so much for joining us for this portion of this show. I so appreciate you and I’ll look forward to seeing you next episode. Until then, remember, goals without action are dreams. Get out there, take action and create the life your heart deeply desires. I’ll see you soon.

 

Important Links

• Clear Vision Investing
• Gifts like Global
• RealEstateInvestingForWomenEXTRA.com

 

 

 

About Nancy Huynh

I was born and raised in Los Angeles, but headed to the East Coast for college. I completed my undergraduate studies in biochemistry and biophysics at Yale University. It was in college that I first became interested in medicine, after spending some time at a local clinic and several summers abroad in developing countries working on innovative health care delivery programs. During medical school, I was drawn to the field of ophthalmology because of the mix of medicine and surgery, the wide variety of interesting pathology and the gratification of preserving and restoring vision. I completed my ophthalmology residency at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary/Harvard Medical School, and obtained additional fellowship training in ophthalmic genetics at the National Eye Institute, National Institutes of Health.

 

——————————————————

To listen to the EXTRA portion of this show go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com

Learn how to create a consistent income stream by only working 5 hours a month the Blissful Investor Way.

Grab my FREE guide at http://www.BlissfulInvestor.com